Jim Ingraham: Thankfully, waste of a Cleveland Cavaliers' season over

Michael Allen Blair/Digital First Media
Cavs' guard Kyrie Irving gives a pair of basketball shoes to a wheelchair bound Cavs' fan during Fan Appreciation Night April 16 at Quicken Loans Arena. The Cavs defeated the Nets 114-85. Big questions remain with Irving heading into the final year of his contract next season.

It’s hard to say what this was. It was either the last game of the season ...
Or calling hours.
In a season in which a record number of NBA teams openly conceded they didn’t really care much about winning, the Cavs cared only about winning. They desperately wanted to win — but couldn’t.
They couldn’t to such a spectacular degree that on the night of April 16, when they officially and mercifully laid to rest their 2013-14 season of shame, they were reduced to the height of ignominy. In the last game of a season, in which they went all out to get all into the playoffs for the first time since you-know-who left, there was nothing left to play for in game No. 82 other than trying to avoid losing 50.
Imagine if they weren’t trying to win.
Actually, don’t do that. We saw what that looked like this season. It was the one awful, ironic constant in this awful, ironic Cavs season. Photo gallery Nets vs Cavs.
While ownership was so indefatigably intent on trying to win now that in preparation for and during this season it fired a coach, hired a new coach, fired a general manager, hired an interim general manager, and OK’d adding payroll through free-agent signings and trades — the players in many games barely even tried.
Lack of effort and lack of intensity by the players was the common theme from start to finish of this sorry season. Their own coach frequently ripped them for it. Their own coach is also partly responsible for it. So is ownership, who hired the coach who the players respect so little that they refused to consistently play hard for him.
Make no mistake about it. However well-intentioned it was, the Cavs’ season that was washed off the slaughterhouse floor with the completion of game No. 82, represents a complete organizational failure, from top to bottom.
Teams that were worse than the Cavs just a couple years ago — congratulations, Toronto, nice going, Charlotte — have blown right past the Cavs and into the playoffs. It wasn’t even necessary to have a winning season to make the playoffs this year. Two Eastern Conference playoff spots went to teams with losing records.
Neither of them are the Cavs.
In a season in which losing was its own reward, the Cavs lost too much.
So even when the bar was lowered to the point where it was lying on the ground, the Cavs still couldn’t figure this thing out.
There’s plenty of blame to go around, and there’s so much that needs fixing the fixers hardly know where to start.
Certainly owner Dan Gilbert, his fan-friendly, I’m-in-the-foxhole-with-you-guys persona notwithstanding, is not blameless. He has yet to prove he can build a winner — LeBron James was already here when he bought the team — and in trying to do so he’s wandered down almost as many dead-end streets as former local professional football team Owner Randolph Lerner.
The decision to bring back Mike Brown — whether it was Gilbert’s alone or at the urging of the fired general manager, with input from the new interim general manager — three years after Brown’s first failure as coach, has so far been a resounding. ... um. ... failure.
Coaching is, first and foremost, leadership. The most obvious indicator of coaching leadership is how hard do his players play for him?
Exhibit A: The Chicago Bulls.
Exhibit Z: Your 2013-14 Cleveland Cavaliers.
Judged in a vacuum, putting aside the three years remaining on Brown’s contract, this Cavs season is what a season looks like when an NBA coach gets fired: the team goes for broke to make the playoffs — and fails miserably.
In-game strategy, player deployment, player development — you can’t even get to those boxes on the coach’s evaluation form if there’s a check mark in the “no” box labeled, “Does his team play hard for him?”
Which is not to say the players themselves aren’t accountable for this hot mess of a season. For all his marvelous basketball talent, Kyrie Irving has revealed himself to be more diva than leader. And when your best player is not a leader, when your best player does not make his teammates better, when your best player, with the season disintegrating around him, takes part in a news conference to announce that one of his teammates doesn’t hate him — maybe you need a new best player.
So as another Cavs season staggers off the stage, there are more unresolved issues than you can shake a poorly conceived inbounds play at.
It almost makes you long for the start of Browns’ mini-camp.
I said almost.
JIngraham@News-Herald.com
@jitribeinsider